Horizon is a leadership and healing ecosystem designed to cultivate resilient, relationally grounded leaders across San Diego’s nonprofit sector.
Launched through the Nonprofit Institute at the University of San Diego, Horizon Equity Adaptive Leadership Scholars (HEALS) equips a cohort of justice-oriented practitioners with the tools, relationships, and reflective space needed to sustain their leadership in complex and often isolating contexts. It is a program of sustainable leadership development for those who have an exemplary history of successful intervention on challenging issues affecting the health and well-being of underserved and under-resourced communities.
Our Approach
Our curriculum blends adaptive leadership theory, somatics, systems thinking, and culturally grounded facilitation.
- Selection Criteria
- Program Guides
- Outcomes
- Successful completion of a recognized leadership fellow’s program or comparable training/life experience
- Evidence of leadership through implementing one or more effective community action projects
- Demonstration of personal reflective capacity and openness to ongoing leadership development and healing
- Testimony to the ability to work well with others and create conditions for collaborative collective action
- Professed commitment to social and environmental justice to transform and bring greater equity to the lives of underserved and under-resourced communities
Horizon has been a catalyst to help me think outside of the box…[it] offered a tenderness and grace that helped ease an anxiety that I think prevented me from thinking clearly about the problem to be solved.
As someone with experience in the systemic/policy change, I find that Horizon's efforts in bridging people across different spaces in the shared social impact/justice sector is super valuable for current and future work.
Meet Our 2025 Horizon Scholars
Horizon Scholars are resilient, purpose-driven leaders who combine self-reflection with the ability to guide thoughtful, engaged action. Motivated by a commitment to justice and equity across sectors, they work to transform systems and improve community well-being.
Horizon Alumni
Horizon Alumni form a diverse network of leaders whose actions before, during, and after the program demonstrate a deep commitment to community well-being. Representing sectors from social and environmental justice to racial equity, economic parity, and education reform, they continue to advance solutions that support stronger, more equitable communities.
This fellowship helped me understand that policy change doesn't always begin in legislative halls—it begins in classrooms, in community centers, and in conversations where we challenge norms and advocate for those unheard. Horizon has made me a stronger, more compassionate leader who’s now unafraid to push for change in the systems that impact our youth the most.
Horizon has made me aware of policies and systemic needs for change in areas that I was not aware of before. In speaking to other Horizon members and staff I learned about their work, their challenges, their efforts. I have been able to ‘see’ the system in San Diego much better through the Horizon community.